Around the World in 32 Countries: Colombia

Number of recognized regional languages: 68
Main languages: Spanish, (in the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina) English

Independence: 1810 (declared from Spain)

Colombia and Panama (and, for a while, even more states) used to be joined as the Republic of New Granada, the Granadine Confederation, and then the United States of Colombia, in the 19th century.

"[... T]he Republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903, leading to Colombia's present borders."

Laguna de la Cocha (El Encano)
Photograph by G. Parra (attr.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Capital City: Bogotá

Surface area: 1,141,748 km2 (larger than Bolivia, smaller than Peru)

Currency: peso
Driving side: right

Main trading partners: United States, China, EU, Latin American countries

Main exports that are food: fruit and other produce, sugar and sweets
Main exports that are not food: mineral fuel, oils, plastics, precious stones, metals, lumber, electronics, clothing, glass, etc.

Information taken from "Colombia" and "List of countries and dependencies by area" [Wikipedia]

***

For Colombia, I read two books.

A Hundred Years of Solitude requires little introduction! Of course it made Gabriel García Marquez one of the giants of world literature. I did not finish it because I objected to some of the content, but it is undoubtedly great literature and an absorbing world to sink into.

It is an epic of multiple generations who begin a backwoods life in the remote forests of Colombia and found a town. Their community is visited by itinerant eccentrics who pierce it, they see the fading traces of the conquistadores of long ago, and disperse at times amongst the men who (for whichever reason) linked up to civilization again by signing up to fight in its wars.

Rocas del abra Zipaquirá
- Landscape in the Zipaquirá archaeological zone, Colombia
Photograph by S. Iizarazo, c. 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Because Marquez's genre here is magical realism, magic rules his characters' existence, whether it is the magic of science or the magic of alchemy.

The descriptions of rural life are not the elite explorations of national history and culture that often characterize 19th century literature to which one is used. The choice of milieu, characters and themes feel symptomatic of the author's leftwing sympathies. There is a distrust of the faraway centres of national authority, which filters through to the attitudes of the characters.

The reason I stopped reading it is that an adult male character becomes infatuated with a 9-year-old girl; even the character recognizes that this is weird, but either way I thought 'I'm out of here.'

Pendants by the lost Tairona people
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Photo by R. Müller (2006)
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

*

La Casa de la Belleza was written decades later, first published in 2015.

It transplants us to modern times in urban contemporary Colombia. Written by a journalist, Melba Escobar de Nogales, it explores Bogotá (a city of over 7 million people — more than Berlin's population) through the lens of a set of women who frequent the eponymous beauty salon. It looks pessimistically at gender relations, class, and racism, and the imperfections of the privileged class. Women and everyone else exploit others as they are exploited themselves. Not unexpectedly, since Colombia is still over 70% Roman Catholic, the book also casts a jaded eye on the rampant violence and moral corruption amongst the purported Christianity of the elite.

Of course the author's theme is the ridiculous juxtaposition of a society's obsession with beauty and material luxury, with the perpetration of ugliness and degradation.

The novel itself was a quick success internationally, translated into multiple languages from the original Spanish. I read it in Spanish and found the vocabulary quite specialized in parts; but now I know what sancocho, avena and aguardiente are.

Escobar writes this passage in La Casa de la Belleza: 

"Al ponerse en rojo, mendigos, desplazados, forajidos, drogadictos, tullidos, saltimbanquis, desempleados, analfabetas, maltratados, mutilados, niños y mujeres preñadas asaltan los vehículos en un performance diario tan repetitivo y predecible que ya a nadie sorprende. O a casi nadie."

(Rough translation: When the traffic lights turn red, beggars, displaced, outlaws, drug addicts, cripples*, charlatans, the unemployed, illiterate, and maltreated, children and pregnant women attack the cars in a daily performance so repetitive and predictable that no one is surprised any more. Or almost no one. [*I'm using this term as it appears to be the closest translation, but I am not sure if it is appropriate to use it in English.])

Karen is the heroine. She grew up in the seaside city of Cartagena as the daughter of a teen mother in the slums, or the barrio. A single mother, saving tips from her work in the Bogotá beauty salon to pay for a better life for her son, dark-skinned and attractive, her warm heart and capacity to care for others are badly repaid with betrayal and rape. A whole network of characters who all know each other begins having a noxious effect on her life. Eventually she becomes an ambiguous figure herself — or does she?

I think this book is a thriller rather than an elaborate literary novel, and it is also frankly just grim to read; I couldn't wait to have it over with and would only recommend it to someone who is neutral-about to fond-of reading about murder and violence against women. It treats its characters too strictly to gather the scope or insight of great literature.

I speak from little relevant experience, but my impression is that the book also splits and founders on a central paradox. It presents itself as critical, fearless and progressive. But the narrative voice complains about minor fishes, never landing real hits on the power figures who bear the most responsibility for the social/political/economic problems that face Colombia. Although she does try to portray individual members as pathetic and frail. In the end it feels more passive-aggressive than iconoclastic.

The book also 'borrows' grievances from Afro-Colombian women — the whole spectrum of racism from the daily torments of straightening hair to look 'respectable,' up to the more violent manifestations — when it might be better to read a book by Afro-Colombian women about this phenomenon instead.

(At the end, I'll note as a disclaimer that a Colombian woman, perhaps in her 30s, was once invited into my high school Spanish class in around 2001 — she was the friend of my teacher. She stressed that many people around the world had a totally wrong view of Colombia: it is not all drug lords and warfare.)

El Salto de Tequendama
Photograph by J. Cufiño (attributed.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence